


Winter Fire

by sadrifice



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Heavy Angst, IT Chapter Two Spoilers, M/M, Minor Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Movie: IT Chapter Two (2019), POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:20:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22869247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sadrifice/pseuds/sadrifice
Summary: Your hair is Winter Fire,January Embers,My heart burns there, too.~Your heart may burn, but so will she, if you let her.
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Bill Denbrough/Beverly Marsh, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Kudos: 7





	Winter Fire

**Author's Note:**

> hey so i just wrote this in a couple days as a break of my WIP that’s my longest yet so if you like these short one lmk they’re fun to do.

~

You decide to come back, and you know it’s for _her_. 

You get a call from Mike, a name you haven’t thought of in decades, and everything, _everyone_ , comes hurtling back to you. It rushes back to you in an all incomposing sorrow. A suffusion of bone-deep, suffocating _loss_ , and longing so fierce it threatens to overwhelm you where you stand. 

You remembered her. 

Your hand reaches into your pocket as if it’s a habit you still carry with you. The signed yearbook page folded in your wallet is suddenly a more crushing weight you do not know if you can bare anymore _now that you know_. The emotional burden of the paper becoming more apparent with every step forward towards her. 

You still kept it all those years, and now you know why.

~

You say goodbye to the life you built, although it’s not as hard as anticipated— it scarcely meant anything to you, anyway, and was never truly what you thought you wanted, what you needed. 

You go your favourite bar, say goodbye to the only friend you’ve made since _them_ , and go home to pack your belongings. 

You pack enough for a weeks stay, although you fear the presumption of only needing around a day or twos’ worth. 

A part of you is excited at proposition of going back, of seeing her— them, all again. Although, a larger, twisted piece of your mind knows there’s something stilted, rotting, and sinister going on beneath your faulty memory that you just can’t seem to grasp.

You remember the pain from back then, the pain you still carry, that has haunted you throughout your entire lifetime, but you never knew that there were happy times, too. 

It floats into your mind’s-eye, shifting into the impression of seven standing together, blood and magic tendrils connecting them just as much as their joined hands. 

You promised you would return for them, back then. And, although you know that if it was grave enough to spill blood, that you promised, you swore, so you must, you still dread going back all the same.

You feel in your heart that going back will lead to nothing but despair, dredged up feelings of bereftness, and certain death, but you go back anyway. It was time to finally return home. 

She’ll be waiting. 

~

She’s the first one of the Losers that you meet again. 

She doesn’t recognise you at first, a sting that’s soothed instantly when she wraps her arms around you in her comforting embrace. 

She tells you how different you look, how _good_ you look now, and something stirs within you at that. 

You cannot even begin to articulate how much more _beautiful_ she’s become since you’ve seen her last. 

You enter the restaurant together, your heart thudding erratically in your chest, embers starting to rise from the cinerary it’s been locked away in since she left Derry, left home. 

She’s become more graceful in her years, the wild fire and storm inside her tampered down, and you know that something doesn’t sit well within you with that. 

But now, she’s practically floating as she excitedly weaves her way through the tables and chairs, positively giddy with the promise of meeting _them_ again. 

And despite your sense of foreboding, you find yourself excited, too. 

You sit down, neves alighting, and chest tightening at the idea of all being in the same room again. The promises of the evening and the company bubbling up in the room, fizzing in your chest. 

You hope that they haven’t changed too much while away from you. You hope that it be the same again, hoping that you’ll still be family. 

And, it is the same. Nearly. 

The night progresses beautifully, jokes flying over the table and life stories being explained. It’s comfortable to speak with them, still. 

Although, you’re all pointedly ignoring the empty seventh seat and the missing a piece to the pact, you all still desperately try to make the evening fun. 

It’s sort of like being transported back to the time you’d forgotten, two images of each Loser overlaying each other, flashing back and forth, and mixing, while old memories clash with the new. 

Everyone’s abundantly happy to see each other again, and you almost can’t believe that you ever forgot _any_ of them. It’s amazing, seeing each other, catching up and laughing together again.

You can still pick her laughter out from the others, her laugh ringing like a bell through the restaurant, filling the room and all of those hollow holes inside of your heart, again. 

Her gaze meets yours throughout the night, eyes still gleaming with secrets you’ll never know of, and contrastingly sparkling under the lowlight of hanging lanterns around you. At least that hasn’t changed. 

Something else that hasn’t changed is the way she looks at Bill. 

The way she chooses to sit beside him, leaning into him occasionally, and absentmindedly running a hand over his, or his arm, along his back, or down his spine, like it’s so comfortable to do so. 

The way she laughs extra hard and loud at the jokes he makes, eyes shining when she looks at him, and how happy she seems to be to be around him. 

The way she still smiles at Bill like she was born just to do it. 

You watch as they both run to each other in the face of danger, how instinctively they protect each other, and clutch each other close. 

At the end of the night, they tell everyone to go on ahead together, that they need to talk to each other. You walk away from them again. But you don’t cry this time like the teenager you once were.

~

Your heart and your footsteps fault as you see what she has in her hands, and go to sit on the stairs with her, a postcard sent from decades ago, delicately clutched between her satin fingers.

She looks at it so dearly, like it’s an amalgamation of her lifetime’s affection, finally returned to its home in her heart, and if she’s finally found her missing piece again. You imagine she’s feeling the same way you did outside that restaurant when you first got her back. 

She tells you, as if you never knew, of what a love lost long ago feels like. How she may feel it again, returning to how it made her feel like when she was a teenager, and how she can’t stop thinking about him. How she received the poetry written on the card from her love, when she truly needed it, and wishes to truly reconnect with him now. 

Your heart soars for a split second, hopelessness struggling against romantics and hope that she remembers, finally, the postcard, the words that connected you both so deeply and devotedly back then. 

She smiles at you softly while she breaks your heart, and whispers the name of another man, one that sent her the postcard, the gorgeous poetry that elates her heart and one that kissed her, warmly, in the Barrens, echoing the feelings of her childhood love. 

The man doesn’t exist, is just a combination between you and one of your best friends, but you don’t tell her otherwise. 

You _will not_ destroy her, will not taint her fantasy, or her chance at being saved. 

(You know she doesn’t need anyone to save her, she’s far from a damsel, and had to fight tooth and nail on her way here by herself, no less. But, you know what she needs to heal from that, and it’s not your inexperience with, and or burying of emotions.)

She radiates the light she’s feeling, the pure joy she wears, and to dim even a portion of that isn’t something, you find, that you could bring yourself to do. 

Her salvation is waiting for her, with him, not with you. 

Your heart may burn, but so will she, if you let her. 

You know her. You know how she’ll ache to choose between two. Hurting people is not apart of her core, something that she will _mourn_ in doing. And you won’t make her, can not be the hand to force her into denying you.

The way her lips curl around his name is more loving and reverent than any poem you have written could ever sound laying on them, and it’s an answer clear as day without even asking the question. 

She loves him again. It’s so obvious as her smile brightens as he walks into the room. Relief soaking her features to know he’s safe, and adoration blazing in her eyes. 

His answering smile says it all. 

The heartbreak is familiar as you step away from her, leave her to her destiny in his arms, and go to another shattered heart upstairs in his room. 

~

You turn away when she looks into your eyes, searchingly, and lost in her way. 

She may have whispers in the back of her mind of what was lost, and questions upon questions to query about her lost past, but she is looking for answers that will annihilate the peace you’ve built within the life you’ve had without her, and you need to be selfish this time, because you don’t know how you will survive without that to cling to. You’d give her _anything_ to be content, but this would be too much this time. 

She searches you for solutions, trying to fit you into her puzzle of a remedy for her confusion. A cure-all to her problems, that she thinks she may find within you. But she doesn’t know what you do, that she will find nothing but hollowness and suffering inside of you, not her emotional saviour. 

You turn away from her, ignoring the questions in her smile. You will not give her more to add to that flame. 

~

A more vindictive side of the darkness that lays within all of you, snarls. _She didn’t want you then, she doesn’t get you now._

But you know that if given the slightest chance you’d run to her, anyway. 

You really try not resent yourself for that, but it doesn’t really work. 

You see them drift apart, becoming more distant but no less close. Friends. You try not to hate yourself further for being glad for it. 

~

She saves you from being buried, and you somehow find a way to love her more. 

It was awful. 

You can hear her screams next to you, final cruel joke by Pennywise knowing that you will never be able to reach her, stuck at the bottom of the earth. 

The clown appears over you, slowly burying you alive inch by inch, while grinning, razor-sharp as he taunts you. 

_“You always knew you would die alone.”_

Fuck that. 

In what you thought to be yours and hers final moments, you give in to the hole inside you. With the dirt falling around you about to suffocate you, and the blood filling the stall about to drown her, you have nothing to lose having already lost everything. 

The roaring cage in the place of your beating heart blazes with inferno, you scream. 

_Beverly, I love you._

She cries out for you, confused and terrified, but you keep going- begging your last words to be an atonement to her. 

_Your hair is winter fire,_

_January embers,_

The rapidly avalanching dirt fills your mouth, cutting you off before you finish, and silencing you forever. But even then, you were glad your final words were to be written to her. 

But then, suddenly, she’s there. 

She’s there, calling for you, desperately and reaching, her hand stretching out to you as a saviour in shining gore. 

She pulls you out, rescuing you instead, and you both land away from the chaos. 

She leans over you. 

You were wrong. 

The poem from her lips is like gospel, a hymn sung by angels, reverential, verses you need to hear until the end of time. 

_My heart burns there, too._

She looks at you with awe and cherishing, mixed with a finality of understanding and thirty year question. 

You’re transfixed, lost in her green-grey eyes. 

She’s so beautiful. 

~

You both survive, miraculously. 

You watch back with the others as she leaps off of the cliff, disappearing into the waters and resurfacing as if reborn. 

You go next. You follow her into the deep oblivion below, chasing _your_ salvation, and 

The blood clinging to her skin, washes away and pools in the water around her, her hair returning to its normal colour of igniting embers and an everlasting glowing blaze. 

You look at her dip under the water, and enough of you wonders what comes next. You don’t have to wonder long, as she drags you under with her. 

She kisses you.

Amongst your grief and your family, she kisses you, deeply and passionate, searing and wonderful. 

Your heart scorches and cinders to ashes in order to burn anew; winter fire _finally_ colliding with it to relight your soul over again. 

You tell her you love her. 

She says it back. 

~

**Author's Note:**

> Originally i was gonna have Bill and Bev end up together ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ kinda like them as a couple better but then i watched the IT Chapter Two scene where Bev finds out it was Ben who wrote her the poem and the looks on their faces kinda persuaded me a bit


End file.
